Introducing Luckless Pedestrian: A Steely Dan Experience…
Steely Dan stands as an enigma in popular music. The music is played nearly as often today as it was in the 1970s when it was first recorded.
Walter Becker and Donald Fagen’s tongue in cheek decision to name their band after a sex toy in a William Burroughs movie was a salute to the aesthetic created by the group of college academia the pair hung out with early in their career. Musicians, poets, beatniks, avant-garde writers, all seem to have influenced their music as they paid homage to the understated yet cutting edge of jazz, pop, funk and R&B. The paradoxes embody what we love about rock history. We researched rock critics and album reviews to try to explain the uniqueness of the group at the time. They struggled….
Billboard at the time explains “Their lyrics embodied and flaunted contradictions: spotlessly produced and impeccably performed studio creations about unsympathetic losers and aging sociopaths.”
Critic Robert Christgau gives it a shot.
“Not olnly does Steely Dan slip the usages of bebop and symbolist poetry beneath the hummable amenities of the hit single on almost every album track, but it does so while embracing masscult at its dreariest. On the most superficial heard-in-the-background level, the band sets up expectations of banality. Then it violates them joyfully, again and again. Never merely suave and functional, the music is full of clever, sometimes disquieting harmonic and rhythmic surprises; the dour intelligence of the lyrics belies the bland cheerfulness implied by the sound of the vocals. As a result, the music becomes a source of intelligent, sometimes disquieting elation.”
(see our links page for more reviews).
Fagen and Becker shunned touring to focus on creating masterpieces in the studio. Great studio musicians of all stripes show up on their albums. Fagen and Becker took perfectionism to new heights often having several musicians interpret their music. What they created turned out to be timeless.
They also shunned the spotlight, preferring to let their music speak for itself. What they created was a musical underground of fans, musicians and loyalists. Most didn’t know which if any of their songs we’re charting on the radio. (Steely Dan had 37 top 40 hits between 1972 and 1981, nine made the top 10). What they did know was that Steely Dan created a hipster cool attitude 40 years before Hipsters were cool.
While the casual listener might think the music is simple as elevator music, the devil is in the details. Steely Dan has a Canon and musicians tempt fate when performing their music. Steely Dan fans are some of the most critical listeners of popular music. That’s the reason we love the challenge. We hope you enjoy our take on some Steely Dan Classics.